Check out the top tips from marketing pros, business leaders, and Twitter experts, on how you can turn those 140 characters into online marketing gold.

So, how can you use the popular social media network, ‘Twitter’ to drive more traffic to your website or business? To answer this question in an effective manner we have compiled a list of some amazing tips from dozens of marketing pros, business leaders, and Twitter experts. These experts have proven their capabilities by marketing their services, products, and brands using Twitter.
Here are 14 great ways to use Twitter to market your business:

1. Optimize the Twitter bio

Jon Ferrera, the CEO of Nimble says that Twitter marketers should make sure that their company’s identity and voice has great branding. This means that you should have a bio that effectively tells other people about your business, who you are, and what you do. It should also include a link to the landing page or website of your company. It is important that the bio has a consistent tone so that other people can clearly understand what your company is about.

2. Get your colleagues involved

\Amanda Cohen, the marketing coordinator at Homescout Realty says that the first people who should help build a brand should come internally. It is important that your coworkers are following you and they’re tweeting about your company and engaging with your tweets.

3. Find out the experts and influencers in your target area and interact with them regularly

Stacy Miller, the social media manager at Vocus (a cloud marketing solutions company), says that you should use Twitter search or tools like Followerwok, Topsy, etc. to find the like-minded customers, influencers, and prospects by searching the keywords related to your industry. Once you find them, then you should follow them and regularly interact with them.

Shanelle Mullin who is the marketing director at Onboardly (a content marketing and PR solutions provider for startups), suggests that you should compile a list of 100 most influential people in the industry. These would include thought leaders, journalists, customers/potential clients, potential partners, writers and bloggers, etc.

Add these people to a private Twitter list. Try to engage with them on daily basis. You can use HootSuite or other tools to make it easier to manage the process. Mullin further says that you should not be promotional; instead you should try to be casual. Try building real relationships and later you can look for the opportunities to collaborate.

4. It is a good idea to ask people for some Twitter love

You should ask your followers to favorite, mention, or retweet. You can encourage them to share your content in fresh tweets.

5. Tweet regularly

According to Sandra Fathi who is the founder and president of Affect (a PR and social media company) regular tweeting gives the impression of a healthy active profile. She says that if you tweet once or twice every week or every month, you are not keeping up with your followers, influencers, and competitors. The folks will simply forget about you.

Fathi recommends daily engagements and postings so that you’re top of mind regularly. It is important that you tweet useful and relevant content that your followers would like to read, favorite, or retweet.

6. Retweet

Mark Rushworth, the Search head at Blue Logic Web, says that you shouldn’t mind retweeting other’s as it will be helpful in linking you with and cementing your thought leadership in the industry.

7. Track your mentions, and respond to them if appropriate

According to Vikram Bhaskaran, the marketing director at Freshdesk, you should track your brand mentions as well as keywords in order to know what your customers or other people are saying about you. Make sure that if there is a need to respond, you respond in a professional and polite manner. There are many customers who post their complaints or product queries on Twitter.

Ginger Geoferry, Social Marketing Director at The Mac Groups recommends setting up the Twitter searches for the terms that are relevant to your company or brand. According to him monitoring conversations in search and joining in, when appropriate is a good idea. For example, let’s say you are a doctor in Buffalo; you can set up the search term ‘doctor Buffalo.’ Then once you see someone from Buffalo tweet, “I want to go to the doctor but it’s hard to get an appointment”, it is a good idea to jump in with a tweet like “We would love to have you as a new patient.”

8. Follow hashtags/trends

Crystal Cantabrana, the Operations director at Grizzly Group LLC (a social marketing solutions company), says that you should check the trending hashtags and try to find a way of making relevant connection to your company. When you put your brand among trending topics, people will see your handle when they search the tweets regarding those topics.

David M. Burrows, the vice president of PR and marketing at Cinsay, says that tagging their posts with couple of trending and relevant hashtags has helped them reach new users. However, you should use the hashtags sparingly so that people don’t see them as ‘Twitter spam.’

9. Favorite tweets

Amy Marshall, the COO of Fathom which is a digital marketing & analytics agency, says that favoriting tweets is something that can give you more attention than the retweets and still many people do not know about it. So consider favoriting tweets you like in your areas of business.

10. Use videos and images

John Lee the Social Media and Brand Manager at Webtrends which is a digital marketing solutions provider has a simple and excellent tip for you. “Get visual.” Videos and photos get about three to four times more clicks on Twitter.

Another marketing guru, Marko Muellner agrees and adds that it has been proven again and again that videos, images and other rich media gets more views and shares compared to tweets with plain text. Muellner is the vice president of Marketing at ShopIgniter which is a social performance marketing platform.

Muellner further says that while the community managers might be doing a good job engaging the followers, a banal post about enjoying weekend is less effective than the rich content in which a person can, for example, view the trailer of a film and know where they can see the movie in their neighborhood. The research has shown that the negative feedback rates for rich tweets are significantly lower as the consumers like interactivity and the content that has been designed for their social mobile context.

11. Offer special rates or discounts to Twitter followers

According to Amy Marshall it is a great idea to run different Twitter contests like: ‘The next 25 people who retweet me are going to get a coupon for 2 5% off,’ or you can have your customers post pictures of themselves using your products or while visiting your store.

12. Integrate Twitter with your other marketing efforts

Mark Schmulen, the general manager of Social Media at Constant Contact says that, Twitter, just like other social media sites, is a lot more effective when it is integrated with other marketing activities of your company. For example, let’s say you are running a contest or a promotion on Twitter. You should tell your email subscribers that you are running this contest or promotion on Twitter. Your email subscribers are another group of customers who like to receive emails from you and want to know more about different offers from you. You can also use it the other way, by tweeting out a link to the mailing list, so that you can tap the Twitter base in to your email content.

13. Use Twitter analytics

Miller says that you should use the native analytics of twitter regularly in order to know what is resonating and what is not resonating with your followers. In your analytics dashboard, you will be able to know the best days for tweeting, what contents get more engagement, and the demographics of your followers. Then you can replicate the things that are working and reevaluate or rework the posts that are not working.

14. Use promoted tweets

Bryan Shaw, the community manager at 3dcart which is an ecommerce platform says that you should not forget to directly target your audience using the promoted tweets. If you fail to define exactly who you are trying to reach, it can cost you money and time.

Aaron Endre, who is a PR and marketing expert, adds that you should make sure that the tweets that you are promoting are not spammy. Your goal should be to provide value that builds credibility and trust. You should not try to trick people into clicking your links.

Alicia Antoniolli, the Social accounts manager at 3Q Digital, says you should try to keep things fresh. It is a good idea to not allow a promoted tweet to run for a long time. If you want to continue to get your message across, just find a slightly different way of saying the same thing.

15. Embrace a Twitter Tool like Tweepi!

Tweepi is a powerful, yet very easy to use Twitter tool that will help you gain more followers on Twitter quickly. Instead of spending many hours of your time trying to find and engage with users on Twitter, Tweepi’s tools will help you spend only a few minutes of your time, so you can concentrate on doing the things you like most, while your followers on Twitter continue to grow. You can also use Tweepi unfollow tool to cleanup irrelevant or inactive users, and use our insightful Twitter tools to understand the social value of all your followers and your productivity.